NEW YORK, NY.- Luhring Augustine is presenting two recent standing floor sculptures by the London-based artist Roger Hiorns. The sculptures feature engines coated with the organic compound copper sulphate, a chemical with an unpredictable reactive potential, which Hiorns has employed to transform massproduced objects into aesthetic entities; a seemingly redemptive gesture exploring the opposition between the natural and man-made. By anthropomorphizing the objects through anatomical references, Hiorns continues to explore the transposable relationship between man and manufactured product in his sculptures, reducing the human figure into representative signs and totems.
Roger Hiorns was born in Birmingham, England in 1975. He has been featured in exhibitions at institutions throughout Europe and the Americas, including the Venice Biennale; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Tate Modern, London; Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and De Hallen, Haarlem, the Netherlands. Hiorns’ work is included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and Tate Modern, London. In 2009, Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize for his critically acclaimed work, Seizure, a massive crystallization within the interior of a flat in a condemned South London council estate. In 2011, Seizure was acquired by the Arts Council Collection and is currently on a ten-year loan for exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Yorkshire, England.
The gallery is also presenting Nummer zestien, the present moment, a new work by the Dutch artist Guido van der Werve. This marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and the work’s debut.
Nummer zestien, the present moment is a three-channel video installation exploring the different states of mind that compose our consciousness, and that we all employ every day to navigate the outer world. The work is shot against a stark black background in a purely psychological space, featuring three separate groups of individuals, all of whom populate the workings of the artist’s interior mind. As the individuals perform essential and mindfulness tasks, human emotions are put on display and reduced to sheer mechanics, an aspect further explored through the mechanics of the camera and musical composition. The three videos investigate the three levels of consciousness: id, ego, and superego.
The film is strictly structured on several axes of time: days, months, years. There are twelve acts, corresponding to the twelve months of the year. The camera motions (synchronized through all three screens) during each act follow the schematic line drawings of the twelve zodiacal constellations presented at the beginning of each act. The existential mood of the work is made more tender by the musical score written by Guido, a paean written in twelve parts in the twelve major keys; a recording of Guido playing emanates from a player piano in the center of the gallery, a surrogate for the artist in this first film in which he does not physically appear.
Van der Werve was born in Papendrecht, the Netherlands in 1977. Previous solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at The Model, Sligo, Ireland; Hayward Gallery, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; De Hallen, Haarlem, the Netherlands; and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. He was the recipient of the 2012 Charlotte Kohler Prize for Visual Art as well as Le Prix International d’Art Contemporain, Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2011. Van der Werve is also a classically trained concert pianist and composer, as well as an avid triathlete.
